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sap

Pronunciation: /sæp/

The English word “sap” has 15 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. The juice of plants of any kind, especially the ascending and descending juices or circulating fluid essential to nutrition.
  2. The sapwood, or alburnum, of a tree.
  3. Any juice.
  4. Vitality.
  5. A naive person; a simpleton.
  6. A narrow ditch or trench made from the foremost parallel toward the glacis or covert way of a besieged place by digging under cover of gabions, etc.
  7. A short wooden club; a leather-covered hand weapon; a blackjack.

verb

  1. To exhaust the vitality of.
  2. To drain, suck or absorb sap from (a tree, etc.).
  3. To make unstable or infirm; to unsettle; to weaken.
  4. To gradually drain (someone's energy or vitality).
  5. To pierce with saps.
  6. To subvert by digging or wearing away; to mine; to undermine; to destroy the foundation of.
  7. To proceed by mining, or by secretly undermining; to execute saps.
  8. To strike with a sap (with a blackjack).

Etymology

From Middle English sap, from Old English sæp (“juice, sap”), from Proto-West Germanic *sap (“sap, juice”) (compare Dutch sap, German Saft, Icelandic safi), from Proto-Indo-European *sab-, *sap- (“to taste”) (compare Welsh syb-wydd (“fir”), Latin sapa (“must, new wine”), Russian со́пли (sópli, “snivel”), Old Armenian համ (ham, “taste”), Avestan 𐬬𐬌-𐬱𐬁𐬞𐬀 (vi-šāpa, “having poisonous juices”),…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.